Gillian Jackson recalls climbing adventures
Mountaineer Gillian Jackson on Malte Brun in 1948.
“Once you’ve looked death in the face there is nothing left to be feared,” says Collingwood resident Gillian Jackson, reflecting on the courage she mustered some 60 years ago that enabled her to climb steep summits, struggle up icy glaciers and risk being swamped by avalanches and rockfalls. “Of course we had no helmets in those days, or safety gear; we just climbed it.”
At an illustrated talk at the library last week, Gillian, now aged 80, singlehandedly entertained lovers of the outdoors with humorous anecdotes about her climbing days, and left everybody in awe as she showed her breathtaking black-and-white slides and hauled out kilos of climbing equipment—polished ice-picks, the heavy japare (a kind of oil cloth), the metal crampons kept on a wooden board, the sisal ropes and the solid backpack.
“We had no lightweight materials in those days and our mountain mules and crampons were quite a bit different from nowadays’ equipment. There were no boots made then for women climbers either, and I had to wear schoolboy’s boots, which were just like cardboard. I never did a trip without thousands of blisters and I lost my toenails several times,” she told the gathered crowd. “Out tent had no floor and we had to lay on the bare rocks or we had rock bivvys and only our sleeping bag covers for shelter. I loved the old huts, but so many of the dear little huts have disappeared now.”
Food was equally low tech, and instead of fancy dried meals, climbers in those days ate “dried potato flakes that looked like grey pellets and were like cement, dried apricots and rice by the gallon. We had dried lumpy milk, porridge and fried digestive biscuits we would put into pockets for eating during the day.”
On one of her climbs Gillian came across a farmer with his nephew who was carrying half a sheep, a jar of peaches, a cauliflower and a sack of potatoes. But not counting her food, Gillian still carried some 30 kilos of gear up and down the dozens of summits she conquered in the Matukituki, Murchison and Cook areas.
She was only 17 when she embarked on her first mountain encounter with the Otago Alpine Club. She led her first climb, a hair-raising scramble up the Shark’s Tooth in the Matukitiki, in 1948, the same year she was made an honorary ranger in Mt Cook National Park. Her most remarkable climbs during that time included her first 3000-metre climb, the ascent of Sefton in 1950, and the Malte Brun from the Murchison Glacier in 1952.
Soon matching her stride was her climbing buddy and husband-to-be, Barrie, a botanist and physician, whom she met on one of her climbs in a snowstorm in 1948. Gillian tells a story that he sneezed so loudly that everybody feared he would trigger an avalanche and, showing a picture of him perching on a peak, commented, “Barrie never smoked, but always, when we got to the top of a summit he smoked a cigar.”
Gillian studied ballet as a child and later became a physical education teacher. She taught art and music all her life and with Barrie at her side raised four children. Although Gillian gave up high mountaineering in 1964 after the birth of her fourth child, the Jacksons continued to explore New Zealand backcountry as a family.
The adventures have paid off. Over the years Gillian has filled many a notebook with drawings and poetic reminiscences, and collected many stories and photographs that create a rich canvas of a life well-lived. With a “hiss and a roar”, says Gillian, she has experienced “some of the best views in the world.”
Ina Holst
